Rose Trappes (2021), Biology & Philosophy 36, article 31 — DOI-10.1007/s10539-021-09805-2
Key takeaways
- NCT’s “evolutionary niche” (the sum of selection pressures on a population) is not a simple translation of Hutchinson’s ecological niche: even against the restricted realized population niche it differs in extension, so ecological and evolutionary findings about niches cannot be transferred between the fields without checking which niche is meant.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-155. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Niche construction theory (NCT) hopes to transform evolutionary biology and to unify it with ecology, but the debate has concentrated on “construction” and neglected what the niche is. Trappes compares NCT’s definition, the niche as the sum of selection pressures acting on a population, with the definitions ecologists use. The evolutionary niche is narrower than the ecological niche in general. Even compared with a restricted ecological concept it has a somewhat different extension, and she identifies three kinds of case where the two come apart: extreme habitat degradation, commensalism, and non-limiting or super-abundant resources. These differences limit how far NCT can unify the two disciplines.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 155 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-155 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a short, clean conceptual analysis that turns “persistence versus fitness differences” into a precise wedge between two fields’ uses of “niche”; its empirical cases are admittedly thin (the CO2 case is offered as “possible”), and it analyses only the 2003 book’s niche concept.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-155, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=155 s is among the higher dwell times in this batch, but the skim already captures the argument, which is compact and case-driven.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-155 is that reading):
- A clean worked example of conceptual analysis blocking an equivocation between two fields that share a term. That is useful for any nucleation note on how scientific concepts are individuated.
- Check whether later NCT work (Laland et al. after 2003, or Stotz 2017) adopts a niche concept that answers the non-coincidence cases. The paper deliberately restricts itself to the 2003 book.
- Pairs directly with LIT-127 (Takola & Schielzeth on individualized Hutchinsonian niches), which takes up the individual-level niches that Trappes sets aside.
Access when seeded: Full open-access PDF (CC BY, 20 pp.) fetched from link.springer.com with a non-browser user agent (the browser-UA request hit a JS challenge); read the abstract, introduction, section heads, Fig. 1, the three cases and the closing section “Niche construction across the conceptual divide”. Publication date from the PDF header (“Published online: 3 June 2021”) and Crossref.